


Repent

by Rotpeach



Series: The Great Tumblr Rehoming of 2018 [23]
Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novels)
Genre: Demonic Possession, Exorcisms, Gen, Holy Water, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2019-09-22 23:17:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17069069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: On the seventeenth day of the girl's possession, the family sends for a priest. They get him instead.





	Repent

**Author's Note:**

> originally tagged as an au but this is the kind of thing that could conceivably happen in the canon setting lmao

On the seventeenth day of the girl’s possession, the family sends for a priest. They get him instead.

He comes in the night, clerical shirt sloppily tucked into blue jeans, dragging a suitcase nearly half his size behind him. And the girl’s family is desperate—they’ve held hands as they whispered prayers, scattered salt, burned effigies, called upon the church and watched exorcists run away screaming covered in boils and crying blood—so they lead him to the barn behind the house and wish him luck with solemn, down-turned gazes.

You watch, through the girl’s eyes, as he sets the massive suitcase down on the floor and sits on top of it, hunched over and squinting into the darkness at you. You snarl, baring the girl’s teeth, and crawl closer to him, blood and dirt caked beneath cracked fingernails. Her body is small and fragile; you’ve pulled clumps of hair out of her scalp and torn her wrists open, smearing her blood over her own face, painting her lips and eyelids a muddy brownish-red. She is long dead now and the body is yours, but it’s still cramped and uncomfortable and you try to tear her apart just a little to give yourself more room. You want this to last, after all. 

He’s smiling peacefully, arms resting on his knees and head tilted in curiosity as you creep closer. “You scared this girl’s family pretty badly,” he says, not in an authoritative or chastising tone as you expected, but conversationally. “But you don’t look all that scary to me.”

You twist the girl’s head to the side, her chin pointing at the wall, and hear her bones cracking. “No?” you ask him, your voice mingling with that of the girl’s in a two-toned, warbling growl. “That’s what the last priest said, too.” You stagger closer on all fours, bloody saliva dribbling from the corner of the girl’s mouth. “Right before I bit his fingers off.”

He chuckles and stands up, and you watch in disbelief as he turns his back on you to unzip the suitcase, kneeling beside it and rummaging through the contents. He isn’t afraid. He isn’t afraid and that infuriates you.

“Your prayers won’t work,” you taunt him. “They’ve tried that. They’ve tried everything. You’re not going to get rid of me.”

“Get rid of you?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder. “No, no. That’s not what I’m here to do. I want you to stick around, buddy. You look like you’ve already made yourself comfortable.”

You narrow your eyes. Something isn’t right. Surely he’s joking, trying to goad you into revealing your weaknesses on your own, but he should know better. He isn’t like the others, and that’s strange.

That _bothers_ you.

“You’re lying,” you snarl at him. “Isn’t that a sin? What did you tell her family, then, if your intention isn’t go get rid of me?”

He stands to his full height and turns to face you. He’s still smiling, and he holds in his hands not a bible or a flask of holy water but a sharpened blade. Not a ceremonial dagger but a serrated hunting knife, crude with rust creeping along the handle. “I did tell them I’d get rid of you,” he says, voice lowering as he takes a step closer, hay crunching under his boot. “This is going to be our little secret.”

You eye him warily. “You aren’t a priest,” you realize.

His smile widens into a toothy grin. You finally recognize that it is not tranquility in his eyes but a subdued mania hidden behind false charm. 

“I don’t care what you are. You’re only human. You’ll end up like everyone who came before you,” you insist. 

That doesn’t stop him. He looks excited now, crossing the barn in long, quick strides and cornering you against the back wall. You didn’t even realize you’d moved. Why did you? He’s a human, and a stupid one to come in here alone, to wave a knife in your face as though it means something to you.

But he looks so _confident_. He looks like he’s dreamed about this, fantasized about it, maybe, and with you in front of him he can barely contain himself. You anxiously twist and turn inside the girl’s body, making her shudder, and try to step around him.

His arm shoots out and you hear the knife slice into the girl’s leg, down her thigh to the back of her knee. It should only graze you—it should be a vague sensation with little more weight than the faint tickle of light fingertips or someone’s breath—but it hurts you. You feel it as if it’s your leg. Shrieking, you stumble, her body heavy and uncoordinated, and land sprawled on the floor of the barn, warm blood pooling beneath you and staining her dress.

“Oh, good,” you hear the false priest sigh. “Looks like it worked.”

“Wh-what?” you growl, twisting around to look at him and trying to drag her body further away when he begins to approach again. “What did you do to me?”

He runs two fingers along the knife, holding it up so you can see it clearly. “This is blessed steel,” he says, and then laughs, “whatever that means. I asked around until I found a priest willing to do it for me.”

You can’t believe what you’re hearing. He came in here without even being sure? He looked you in the eye—in _her_ eye, not that it makes a difference; if he stabs you there with that fucking knife it’ll feel the same—without any certainty that he could hurt you?

You cough when his boot slams down on her back and you suddenly have trouble breathing, feeling the pain travel through the girl’s body into your very being. “Fuck you. This isn’t enough to kill me,” you hiss. Your struggles make her body convulse, but you can’t free yourself. 

He chuckles, and you gasp when he pushes more of his weight onto you, hearing something in the girl’s back cracking. “I told you, I’m not trying to get rid of you,” he says. “You’re a demon, right? I bet you can take way more than this.”

The weight on your back—her back, you tell yourself frantically, it’s hers, it isn’t yours, this shouldn’t bother you—vanishes, and you try to scramble across the floor to get away from, but then you feel the knife sinking into the other leg, tearing into the skin of her thigh exposed by her dress riding up. You make her bite her lip, trying to keep your voice in.

He doesn’t like that.

“Come on,” he urges impatiently, “you made a nice sound earlier. Let’s hear that again.” He pulls the knife along the back of her leg, her flesh parting like an unraveling seam, and tears up every muscle and tendon on the way down. You feel faint; you’ve never felt anything like this before, never felt any of the things you did to any of the bodies you possessed. Peeling off skin and cutting them open always brought a relief with it, widening the space you had to inhabit and work with, but this is not like anything that’s happened before.

 _He_ is not like anything you’ve ever dealt with before.

“Still being stubborn, huh?” he mutters, yanking the knife out of her leg and drawing a pained wheeze out of you. “Well, I didn’t want to have to use this, but you’re not giving me a lot to work with here.”

You watch as he steps out in front of you, returning to the suitcase for something and then disappearing into the darkness of the barn for the far corner out of range of her human eyes. You feel uneasy that you can’t keep an eye on him and try to move, but her legs are in agonizing pain and you’re feeling every pulse of it. All you can do is wait.

You hear metal scraping across the floor and then you can see him again, dragging a metal pail across the barn and leaving it in front of you. You watch, panic rising, as he uncaps a gallon jug of something clear and odorless and begins to fill the pail. A droplet splashes onto your face and it _burns_ , and you suddenly understand.

“Wait,” you say frantically, “Wait, you can’t, you don’t even know how—!”

“Of course I do,” he scoffs, sounding offended. “Holy water burns demons, right? It’s not that hard to use.” He grins when the jug is emptied and tosses it aside, crouching in front of you to look you in the eye. “I’ve heard it’s just a little painful usually, so it wouldn’t be any fun to just dump it on you. 

He wraps her long hair around his fist and pulls, tugging you forward, and you struggle to keep your balance on her trembling knees. He starts to push your head down, closer to the holy water, and you let out a whimper.

“You can’t do this,” you tell him, trying and failing to keep the fear out of your voice. “Y-you’d have to hold me under a long time to do any real damage, and she couldn’t take that. You’ll drown her and you’ll never get her back.”

He doesn’t know she’s already dead. He doesn’t have to.

He hesitates for a moment and you hold your breath, waiting. Then he tugs her hair back up so you look at him, and you see a gleeful expression that fills you with dread. “I don’t really care what happens to her,” he admits easily. “I figured I’d just tell them she died either way. I’m way more concerned about you, buddy.”

“Please no,” you beg, speaking quickly, “look, I, I can make a deal with you, alright? Whatever you want, it’s yours, okay? Anything. It can be anything, it doesn’t matter, even if it seems impossible, I can do it, b-but you can’t do this to me, that’s the agreement.”

He laughs in her (your) face. “A deal?” he muses. “I don’t really need that kind of thing. I’m happy with my life.” He licks his lips. “There is something I want, but I don’t need to make a deal with you to get it.”

“Wh-what is it?” you ask. “I can get it for you faster, easier!”

He leans in, murmuring against the cool, dead flesh of her ear, but it feels as though there’s no barrier there at all. Nothing to keep you safe from him. “I want to see you suffer,” he whispers.

Then he forces her head into the pail.

You scream the moment her skin meets the water and feel it all over you, hotter than any fire as it begins to bubble. It rushes into her open mouth and nostrils, slides down her throat and into her lungs in mouthfuls you don’t mean to take, filling you with an inferno worse than any pain you’ve felt in your entire existence. You flail and you scratch at his arms but her nails are dull and just slide over his skin. 

If there were any chance that she was still alive, it’s gone now, drowned in the boiling holy water, and you’re just starting to wonder if you’ll die stuck in her pathetic body, too, when he suddenly tugs you out by her hair, and you sputter and cough and scream until you’ve destroyed her voice and it’s just your own inhuman growls ringing in the open air. 

“That’s more like it,” the man says.

When he lets go, you crumple to the floor, knocking the pail over and spilling the holy water everywhere, but it’s too late. You’re exhausted, too weak to move or leave her body, unable to do anything when he picks up her corpse with you inside and hoists you over one shoulder, dragging the suitcase out of the barn.

He tells her family that she’s dead and that he’ll ensure the body is properly cleansed before burial, but they seemed to have known it would end like this all along. They thank him for not letting her suffer any longer, they shower him with gifts and praise for getting rid of the demon, they see him out with tearful and bittersweet smiles, unaware that he is not what he says he is.

He tosses you into the trunk of his car and grins, staring directly through her glassy, gray eyes and looking at you instead. “Still in there, I see,” he says. “Good. I think you and I are gonna have a lot of fun.”

The trunk door slams shut over you and leaves you in darkness. You lay there in the body of the dead girl and weep quietly to yourself. He must be lying. He can’t be human. He _can’t_ be.

You know monsters and he’s a greater one than any of them.


End file.
